Friday, May 31, 2013

Stephen
Co and Eric Robins are the authors of Your
Hands Can Heal You: Pranic Healing Energy Remedies to Boost Vitality and Speed
Recovery from Common Health Problems (with one John Merryman), and that
tells you pretty much everything you need to know about them. Prana is the
Indian version of chi or reiki, and just as solidly based on anything but reality. What Co and Robins propose
is thus a form of energy healing based on the New Age understanding of energy as a form of fuzzy, buzzing cloud of metaphysical vapor, or, in other words, on
a less than coherent version of medievalist vitalism,
which medieval practitioners believed in because they were stupid, lacked any
idea of scientific method, and were severely short on imagination (as Dennett
puts it: “Vitalism –
the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all
living things – turns out to have been not a deep insight but a failure of
imagination”). I’ll leave it to readers to determine what that makes of Co and
Robins, though it should be noted that their book has sold pretty well among
the usual groups of more seriously critical thinking-challenged flapdoodlers.
It can indeed be reasonably said that vitalism, in all its fluffy incoherence,
is the root of all “complementary and alternative medicine” (for instance acupuncture).

Eric
Robins (a board-certified urologist), at least, has produced some “amazing” anecdotes (though the link is not to his
anecdotes) reflecting how his techniques will seem to work to those who don’t
understand why anecdotal evidence is problematic, underpinned by how “following his beliefs” rather than
science seems to have had beneficial effects – as does what he calls having an
open mind, which is of course not having an open mind at all (this is what having an open mind amounts to) but being severely rooted in
confirmation bias and similar psychological mechanisms bound to lead anyone who cares about truth seriously astray.

Stephen
Co’s credentials are less deceptive. Apparently “Master Stephen Co is the senior disciple of
Grand Master Choa Kok Sui and one of only two Master Pranic Healers in the
world.” He and his wife Daphne started the first pranic healing in the US, and
apparently he’s got plenty of students.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is one of the oldest and largest organizations devoted to investigating
cases of reported UFO sightings, and it operates a worldwide network of
regional directors for field investigation, holds an annual international
symposium, and publishes the monthly MUFON UFO Journal. Its stated mission is “the scientific study of UFOs for
the benefit of humanity through investigations, research and education,” but
the “scientific” part
of it is, shall we say, not unencumbered by confirmation bias and crackpottery
(their website even provides its own Humpty-Dumpty definition of “scientific study”,
just to make sure). The organization is currently based in Ohio, and directed
by Clifford Clift (actually, as of present the presidency seems to have been
yielded to one Dave McDonald, so I suppose Clift must count as ”former
director”). They also have various state chapters and regional directors, and it
is not unlikely that Barbara Delozier, listed as State Section Director
Northwest, is the same as Barbara Delozier, Dolphyn Wisdom of the Ancient,
Metaphysical Minister, who runs the My Psychic Friends network.

It is in
fact rather charming how MUFON in their communications try to dress up their
already given conclusion in a language that is notionally open to skepticism,
without really allowing for the possibility that their conclusions are wrong
(an example is here,
and another one – presented by one James Carrion – is here,
though Carrion has later left MUFON and denounced the project because of its badly conducted investigations, a total lack of evidence, and
less than scientifically-minded approach to the questions). Now, MUFON does
like to complain that they aren’t taken seriously by mainstream science, just
like cryptozoologists, bigfooters, and the Intelligent Design crowd are not
taken seriously by the scientific establishment and for equally obvious reason.
The problem is of course that despite their official stance MUFON is in
practice little more than an UFO cult for the crazy and the conspiracy theorists
(i.e. the crazy). A report from one of their meetings is here,
and illustrates that point rather splendidly. Another fasinating five-part
expository of one of their meetings can be found here.

Diagnosis:
Cultlike collection of crackpots who desperately try to pass as rational
inquirers. Their failure is pretty complete.

J.R.
Church was a ravingly, frothingly mad fundie who “has a passion for
discovering the deeper truths in the Word,” which means that Church peddled the
delectable combination of hardcore Taliban fanaticism with hardcore conspiracy
theories that might have made even Alex Jones pause (though his companion Gary Stearman has actually appeared on, you guessed
it, the Alex Jones show). As a matter of fact, Church appears to have passed
away relatively recently, though we decided to include the entry anyway given that his
stalwart companion and faithful disciple Gary Stearman is still promoting the madness.

Among Church’s numerous books you’ll find such gems as Hidden Prophecies in the Psalms, Guardians of the Grail: And the Men Who Plan
to Rule the World, Hidden Prophecies
in the Song Of Moses, and Daniel
Reveals the Bloodline of the Antichrist. Guardians of the Grail is his most famous one. In it Church
explored the legend of the Holy Grail and deluded himself into imagining links
between the Knights Templar,
Priory of Sion,
the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry,
House of Theosophy,
and modern Mormonism. The book also discusses the way mankind will be deceived
into accepting worldwide enslavement under the guise of “peace and prosperity”
by the Antichrist and his establishment.

With Gary Stearman (author of the probably fascinating Time Travelers of the Bible: How Hebrew
Prophets Shattered the Barriers of Time-Space) Church used to run the
website Prophecy in the News (also a magazine), where you can read about the 200 fallen angels that
according to the Book of Enoch descended to the top of Mt. Hermon before Noah’s
flood – these corrupt angels entered Earth through a “space portal” and
proceeded to pollute the human genome, and they are connected to the UFO crash
in Roswell. The website also offers you some astrology under the title “the
Gospel in the Stars”. Bob Ulrich’s book reviews are also interesting if you
ever considered paying them a visit.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Dawson
Church is a “researcher”
in the field of energy medicine (which is firmly based on the New Age understanding of "energy" as a tangible cloud of fluff) and author of Communing
With the Spirit of Your Unborn Child, Facing
Death, Finding Love, Soul Medicine
and The Genie In Your Genes. In other
words, if snowflakey energy woo is your thing, Dawson Church is your man.He
earned his doctorate (non-accredited) in Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the mentorship of none other than neurosurgeon C. Norman Shealy,
and can also pride himself on a “postgraduate Ph.D.” in Natural Medicine, as well as a “clinical certification” in Energy
Psychology. Impressive.

Church is
the founder of Soul Medicine Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to “research, education and therapies
that link consciousness with healing,” and which offers the Iraq Vets Stress
Project for veterans seeking energy psychology treatments. They publish the
journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research,
Practice, Training (which is not PubMed indexed). Church’s main schtick
appears to be Gary Craig’s Emotional Freedom Technique, an
especially silly brand of the completely unsupported idea of thought field therapy (there is a useful discussion here).

Diagnosis:
As far into loonland as crackpots go. The stuff he pushes has nothing to do
with reality, but he seems to try to make up for that by pushing it
particularly ardently.

Kiril
Chukanov is a free energy proponent, and runs this website.
Originally from Bulgaria, Chukanov seems to reside in the US (thus qualifying
for inclusion), and claims to have worked on the “problem of cold fusion” at the University of Utah in the 90s. His status is admittedly a little
unclear, but at least his website kindly informs us that “Dr Chukanov is not ’implemented’
in the USA and ’managed’ by some secret person (out of the USA) as some
obviously mentally ill people are claiming. Dr Kiril Chukanov is not connected
or supervised by any persons or organizations ’in’, and ’out’ of the USA,”
which is good to know, I suppose. Apparently the Canadian government has
launched an “official
conspiracy” against him when they seem to have denied his company the right to
become a Public Company, apparently because the bullshit he was meddling with
(Chukanov’s systems seem to be based on ball lightning)
had the potential of being rather dangerous.

He has
written and published several volumes of “Quantum Mechanics”, including “Final Quantum Revelation”, though
his work has unfortunately failed to make an impact on the scientific
community. Sympathizers have compared Chukanov’s work to the work of Andrea Rossi,
which is not quite the same thing. There is a link to an interview with
Chukanov (on which the interviewer seems to be on his knees throughout to make
Chukanov look more glorious in the manner of a Lenin statue) here.
The guiding idea that Chukanov is pushing is that his systems create excess
energy that appears from nowhere. Since the technologies produce more energy
than they spend, they will be able to produce free energy (also here,
and here).

At least
Sterling D. Allan, the stalwart reporter at freeenergynews.com, could report that a “visual
intuitive” in his extended family had seen the “skeletal structure” of Chukanov’s Ball lightning in a vision or dream. Credentials bestowed by peer reviewed publications pale
in comparison with such intimate intuitions, I suppose.

Diagnosis:
Hard to tell, but even remotely connected to anything resembling reality it
certainly isn’t.